Monday, May 22, 2017

As a kid, I was drawn to
science fiction like a moth to a flame. Star Wars premiered the same
month I was born and my favorite after school entertainment in the 1980s
consisted of reruns of the original Star Trek. In elementary and middle
school, I scoured the shelves of my local video rental shops for science
fiction movies I hadn’t seen yet. At the age of ten, I remember feeling caught
between sci-fi kids’ movies like Flight of the Navigator, which left me
feeling bored and unsatisfied, and classics of the genre like 2001: A Space
Odyssey, which I knew I was way too young to appreciate or understand
fully. A few years ago, I came across Zathura: A Space Adventure and
suddenly felt like I had stumbled upon a secret portal to my childhood.

Opening on a sunny
summer day, Zathura sets a brisk pace and introduces us to Walter and
Danny, two brothers competing for their father’s attention and fighting against
the ultimate scourge of childhood: boredom. Soon, the boys learn that they will
have to spend the afternoon together and younger brother Danny discovers an
antiquated board game titled, Zathura: A Space Adventure. Walter
reluctantly joins Danny in playing the game and almost immediately the brothers
find themselves navigating a realm in which the game’s dilemmas like meteor
showers, defective robots, and alien attacks feel all too real. If the plot
sounds more than a little bit familiar, it’s helpful to know that the author of
the source material, Chris Van Allsburg, also wrote Jumanji. This
adaptation of Van Allsburg’s work blasts off into an imaginative realm of
palpable risk and excitement where the 1995 movie version of Jumanji
gets mired down in a swamp of muddled computer graphics and flat performances.
Director Jon Favreau brings Zathura sparking to life through a reliance
on practical special effects, a focus on ensemble acting with a young, gifted
cast, and a script crackling with snappy dialogue. Favreau began his Hollywood
career as an actor in the 1990s with a breakout role in the indie hit, Swingers,
but has since switched trades and established himself as a dependable director
of distinctive, successful mainstream films like Elf, Iron Man,
and the recent live action version of The Jungle Book. Just as Zathura
the board game offers the boys experiences with which video games and TV cannot
possibly compete, this movie provides visceral thrills that far outperform the
scores of contemporary family movies that lean too heavily on weak narratives
and computer generated effects. Favreau taps into the heart of Van Allsburg’s
book, expands the scope of the original story, and delivers one of the most
satisfying family-friendly sci-fi movies of this century.

As a book, Zathura
covers just thirty pages, but Favreau targets the key elements of why it has
become a modern classic of children’s literature and embellishes this
adaptation with style and substance. Favreau pulls off the tricky feat of
taking a well-loved kids’ book and fashioning it into a funny, boisterous movie
that packs an emotional punch and succeeds on its own. In 2009, Spike Jonze
attempted something similar with his take on Maurice Sendak’s almost
universally adored book, Where the Wild Things Are, but ended up making
a movie that bewildered audiences and bore very little resemblance to the
enchanting power of the original. Zathura was Favreau’s third project as
a director, but with it he established the kinetic, vibrant, and irreverent
elements that would come to define his work. By infusing Iron Man and Iron
Man 2 with his stylistic trademarks, Favreau set the tone for the sprawling
multi-media franchise known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe. A lot of people
missed Zathura when it hit theaters in 2005, but now is as a good a time
as any to take your chances and see where this adventure will take you.